Miller Lite draws calls for boycott over 'woke' advert: 'Did nobody learn from Bud Light?'

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Miller Lite is facing a brewing backlash over an advertisement that apologizes for decades of sexist imagery in beer commercials, and offers reparations of a sort.

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The 90-second spot features comedian and actor Ilana Glazer explaining to viewers that “women were among the very first to brew beer, ever. From Mesopotamia to the Middles Ages to Colonial America, women were the ones doing the brewing.”

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She adds: “Centuries later, how did the industry pay homage to the founding mothers of beer? They put us in bikinis.”

Glazer then goes on to explain Miller’s “Bad S#!T to Good $#!T” campaign, which involves turning old advertising material into compost, feeding that to worms, using the resulting fertilizer to grow hops, and donating those crops to women brewers.

But the message has angered many on social media who are now calling for a boycott of the Molson Coors product. This barely six weeks after a similar furor erupted over a TikTok post by transgender activist Dylan Mulvaney, who had received free samples of Bud Light beer.

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That boycott hurt sales of the rival Anheuser-Busch brand among U.S. conservatives, although Business Insider magazine subsequently reported that global sales for the company had dropped by only one per cent during that time, and that the company’s stock had risen after it reported strong quarterly earnings.

The Miller Lite ad has been pilloried by the likes of radio host Clay Travis, who tweeted: “Miller Lite saw the Bud Light disaster and decided they needed their own woke beer ad.” Graham Allen, host of the Dear America podcast, added: “Did NOBODY learn from Bud Light’s COSTLY mistake? Miller Lite just dropped this WOKE advertisement!!!” And conservative commentator Rogan O’Handley chimed in with: “Miller Lite apparently wants the Bud Light boycott treatment too. Well they can have it.”

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Others have pointed out that the advertisement is humorous; that women make up half the population of potential customers; and that, far from following in Bud Lite’s sudsy footsteps, the Miller campaign was rolled out in early March to coincide with Women’s History Month.

“Many in the beer industry (Miller Lite included) alienated the very people who helped create it,” the company said in a March 7 press release. “How? By dividing women as consumers, objectifying them in their ads, and frankly, putting a lot of bad $#!T out there.”

Last year, Miller Lite launched a line of Mary Lisle cans, in celebration of the first female brewer in American history, who inherited her late father’s brewhouse in Philadelphia in 1734.

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It was a far cry from 2003, when Miller released its “Catfight” commercial, featuring two women wrestling in mud and tearing off each other’s clothes over whether Miller Lite “tasted great” or was “less filling.”

That ad also drew criticism (over email rather than Twitter), with image consultant Laura Ries remarking: “It’s explicit. It’s degrading. It has no real message, except all men are idiots and all they think about are girls mud wrestling.”